Spanning nearly four decades, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world's longest running household panel study. The resulting data archive presents research opportunities for breakthroughs in understanding the connections between economic status, health and well-being across generations and over the life course. The long panel, genealogical design, and broad content of the study represent a unique opportunity for a multi-perspective study of life course evolution and change within families over three generations. Based on relational data structures and advanced web-based archiving and delivery tools, the PSID has a publicly available web-based facility for users worldwide to create customized data extracts and codebooks based on more than 55,000 variables from over 65,000 individuals over nearly four decades. To fully capitalize on the existing resources we propose three specific aims across five projects and two cores. First, we propose to collect data from PSID families to expand the scientific potential of the data archive for the study of economic status, health, and well-being over the life course and across generations. In Project 1 (Schoeni) we propose to continue the collection and dissemination of health, wealth, savings, and pensions for three additional waves of PSID 2007-2011 and in 2007 add two new question series, one on retrospective childhood health which will broaden the potential of life course models proposed in Project 2 (Smith) and one on intergenerational family transfers that will be used in Project 5 (Stafford). We propose to implement in 2009 an extensive and innovative data collection on time use and well-being in married PSID couples aged 50 and older who vary by disability status as proposed in Project 4 (Freedman). Second, we propose to generate significant multidisciplinary scientific contributions to research on life course and generational health, SES, and well-being within the fields of economics, epidemiology, psychology, medicine, and survey methods using the full archive of PSID data, 1968-2011, through the analytic work proposed in Projects 2-5. Third, we plan to facilitate and promote the use of the health, wealth, and pension data in the PSID by: conducting two competitive pilot grant programs and associated scientific workshops targeting the themes of pensions, private accounts, and retirement savings throughout the life course, and intra- and intergenerational connections in health and socioeconomic status within the family (Core B);conducting outreach at professional meetings (Core B);and continuing to develop user friendly data tools to facilitate the creation of intra- and intergenerational data extracts (Project 5). We propose a centralized administrative leadership to ensure successful coordination, communication, and resource allocation among the projects (Core A).
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